Trucks carried snow, trucks carried bones, dogs, which lived in the winter by the snow-melting boilers, watched for the trucks, and everything around was waiting for something.
This anticipation, like a secret ballot, selected two genii loci, two of its permanent residents.
The old woman who came to the store with her old cat in a purse and showed him—as people came out of the store with their purchases—what she could have fed him if they increased her pension; and the old man who collected bottles in the morning and then used the kopecks he got for the movies, watching the same film a dozen times; everyone waited, everyone hoped silently; having read a lot of spy novels I hoped that a plane would accidentally drop a bundle with clothing, money, gun, and documents, a package with a different fate.
There were a lot of poplars in the area, and in the summer the wind chased balls of dusty gray fluff along the sidewalks; later, in the Kazakhstan desert, I saw balls of tumbleweed and I learned that the infinity of boredom was the indifferent repetition of life. I understood that I had experienced that sensation before—it was the background of my childhood: trucks with bones, trucks with snow, stray dogs by the road, clumps of fluff in the gutter, carried by the wind.
It wasn’t that nothing new ever happened in the neighborhood of my childhood; worse was that there was nothing old in it: its houses, built to depopulate the dormitories, communal flats, and rooms with eight people in eight square meters, started falling apart the moment they were built; they lacked the dignity of age. Life did not expand, it limped along, going nowhere.
Now in this northern town, it was like returning to my childhood; I recognized the twisted backyards, delineated by laundry, the roofs over domino tables, the sandboxes—and right there, the garages and sheds; everything was so mixed up and stuck together, growing into one another, that I thought: it’s no wonder that the most attractive place of my childhood was the shooting gallery—a blue trailer behind the movie theater. There was always a long line, and from the number of people waiting—five kopecks a shot, moving targets attached to the ceiling, rabbits, boars, and wolves—you could guess that the shooting gallery served a special need; people lived among fences, alleys, dead ends, and went to the gallery for a gulp of straight shooting, to see the clarity of the goal.
I went back once to my old place, where I had not been for over twenty years. Streets, houses, yards—everything seemed extremely small and miserable; you could imagine that I had grown up and what had seemed enormous to me was now in its normal size. But that explanation left something out, it was based on dry mathematical calculation; I thought that sometimes a child is forced to see not the geometry of space that exists but the one he creates in his gaze, increasing perspective, adding volume where it does not exist in reality.
I realized that I simply could not have lived as a child in that courtyard, among those houses—they were too spiritually and visually insignificant even for a nine-year-old, and the exaggerated metamorphosis that I imposed on them was a question of salvation and self-preservation.
I walked past sheds and garages; I needed to find out, to see the town from the inside out, walk the paths and tracks that its residents used, to re-create the drawing of their movements—that is how a place becomes familiar; on Friday nights they drank at the garages, spreading a newspaper on the hood of a car or on a crate; there was music—persistent music that I had already heard in the taxi; its essence wasn’t in the melody but in the cheap voices, male and female.
Cheap voices—men and women sang about love, separation, meetings, long sentences, prison, they sang as if the night before moving they’d heaped everything into a single pile without separating the rubbish from the essential. People drank and ate to those voices, cooking shashlik somewhere; the garages and sheds came to an end, the trampled thin woodland began, and on every meadow a bonfire burned.
And suddenly, in the woods, I heard different voices—people conversing, how much to pour into whose glass, who wants the hotdog, give me a light, and this simple conversation was without the empty intonations that pretend to add some meaning.
I turned from the road and saw five men sitting on logs. One, quite old, sliced up a sausage and then stuck the knife in his leg—no one winced, they all knew it was wooden; another, also an old man, sat aloofly, leaning on a stick made out of a bus handrail, bicycle reflectors sewn onto his faded overalls; the third, with a scar across his whole face covered with rough stubble, was pouring vodka into the glasses, the fourth I saw only from the back and he sat too still, as if paralyzed, and the fifth, on the contrary, was shaking, a subcutaneous tic ran all over his body, and his features winked at one another, made faces, and his left eyebrow teased the right.
You could see their miners’ past in them; the horizon, or plane, is a work term for a miner; in order to reach the horizon—one of many—you have to go down into the mine, and often miners work on a single horizon for decades, limited for them by the end of the pit face; their horizon is a dead end, and people fight the rock in that dead end, but it merely retreats without ceasing to be a dead end, and labor in the pit face—even if the ore is hauled up to the surface—is labor that has no exit in itself.
The horizon of life, underground, dark, the daily descent into the mountain strata, where it is already warm from the heat of the depths, a descent along a long vertical; the people working in mines seem to hold the sky on their shoulders; the body remembers the pressure of the stone strata sensed by the spinal cord. Heavy muscles, heavy tread—they are like lead and platinum in the table of elements, they are compressed by pressure, they are nurtured by darkness. Underground walkers, receiving a miner’s headlight sturdier than a human body every twenty-four hours from the lamp room—they were people who live in two worlds, this one and that one, people whose daily path on the ground is shorter than their path under the ground—the side drifts are often several kilometers long, and the miners walk beneath their houses, the city, the suburbs, walk though stone, where there are only the mole tunnels of the drifts and the vertical conduit of the mine shaft—its throat, the only way up.
All five had been miners, laborers of the underground; all five had been in accidents at different times. Now they stuck together—half-crippled, too strong to die; the mine tossed them out like slag, but there was enough power in their bodies for a long life—life after the collapse—and they gathered here in the woods, where they could see the quarry, the mine yard, the building of the shaft, the waste banks and refuse heaps; it seemed that the mine attracted them, lured them to this place.
They noticed me and asked for cigarettes; I gave them mine and they offered me a drink. The vodka slid down to my stomach like a warm slug; they asked me who I was and where from—without curiosity, I had two legs and not one; I told them I was searching for at least a trace of a man who was long gone—and named Grandfather II.
They were silent, the combination of letters did not move or upset them. Of course, I did not expect random people in the woods near the city limits to know Grandfather II’s biography, that the mystery of his life would be solved so easily; however, I kept stilclass="underline" for the first time it occurred to me that perhaps it was no longer possible to learn something about Grandfather II, that I was the only person who had part of the information about him and the rest was lost for good, dissolved, or else existed without any connection to him, for example, just as objects who knows from where, things among things; a photograph in somebody’s dresser drawer, a book on a shelf, a cup in the cupboard and no force of will, no insight could combine them, make them recognize one another and give evidence.